Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Thoughts in the Presence of Fear

I. The time will soon come when we
will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without
remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism
that ended on that day.

II. This optimism rested on the proposition that we were
living in a “new world order” and a “new economy” that would “grow” on
and on, bringing a prosperity of which every new increment would be
“unprecedented”.

III. The dominant politicians, corporate officers, and
investors who believed this proposition did not acknowledge that the
prosperity was limited to a tiny percent of the world’s people, and to
an ever smaller number of people even in the United States; that it was
founded upon the oppressive labor of poor people all over the world; and
that its ecological costs increasingly threatened all life, including
the lives of the supposedly prosperous.

IV. The “developed” nations had given to the “free market” the
status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands,
and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems
and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global
warming as normal costs of doing business.

V. There was, as a consequence, a growing worldwide effort on
behalf of economic decentralization, economic justice, and ecological
responsibility. We must recognize that the events of September 11 make
this effort more necessary than ever. We citizens of the industrial
countries must continue the labor of self-criticism and self-correction.
We must recognize our mistakes.

VI. The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological
euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on
innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we
should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which
would cause the economy to “grow” and make everything better and
better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of
all things inherited and free. All things superseded in our progress of
innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of
no value at all.

VII. We did not anticipate anything like what has now
happened. We did not foresee that all our sequence of innovations might
be at once overridden by a greater one: the invention of a new kind of
war that would turn our previous innovations against us, discovering and
exploiting the debits and the dangers that we had ignored. We never
considered the possibility that we might be trapped in the webwork of
communication and transport that was supposed to make us free.

VIII. Nor did we foresee that the weaponry and the war science
that we marketed and taught to the world would become available, not
just to recognized national governments, which possess so uncannily the
power to legitimate large-scale violence, but also to “rogue nations”,
dissident or fanatical groups and individuals – whose violence, though
never worse than that of nations, is judged by the nations to be
illegitimate.

IX. We had accepted uncritically the belief that technology is
only good; that it cannot serve evil as well as good; that it cannot
serve our enemies as well as ourselves; that it cannot be used to
destroy what is good, including our homelands and our lives.

X. We had accepted too the corollary belief that an economy
(either as a money economy or as a life-support system) that is global
in extent, technologically complex, and centralized is invulnerable to
terrorism, sabotage, or war, and that it is protectable by “national
defense”

XI. We now have a clear, inescapable choice that we must make.
We can continue to promote a global economic system of unlimited “free
trade” among corporations, held together by long and highly vulnerable
lines of communication and supply, but now recognizing that such a
system will have to be protected by a hugely expensive police force that
will be worldwide, whether maintained by one nation or several or all,
and that such a police force will be effective precisely to the extent
that it oversways the freedom and privacy of the citizens of every
nation.

XII. Or we can promote a decentralized world economy which
would have the aim of assuring to every nation and region a local
self-sufficiency in life-supporting goods. This would not eliminate
international trade, but it would tend toward a trade in surpluses after
local needs had been met.

XIII. One of the gravest dangers to us now, second only to
further terrorist attacks against our people, is that we will attempt to
go on as before with the corporate program of global “free trade”,
whatever the cost in freedom and civil rights, without self-questioning
or self-criticism or public debate.

XIV. This is why the substitution of rhetoric for thought,
always a temptation in a national crisis, must be resisted by officials
and citizens alike. It is hard for ordinary citizens to know what is
actually happening in Washington in a time of such great trouble; for
all we know, serious and difficult thought may be taking place there.
But the talk that we are hearing from politicians, bureaucrats, and
commentators has so far tended to reduce the complex problems now facing
us to issues of unity, security, normality, and retaliation.

XV. National self-righteousness, like personal
self-righteousness, is a mistake. It is misleading. It is a sign of
weakness. Any war that we may make now against terrorism will come as a
new installment in a history of war in which we have fully participated.
We are not innocent of making war against civilian populations. The
modern doctrine of such warfare was set forth and enacted by General
William Tecumseh Sherman, who held that a civilian population could be
declared guilty and rightly subjected to military punishment. We have
never repudiated that doctrine.

XVI. It is a mistake also – as events since September 11 have
shown – to suppose that a government can promote and participate in a
global economy and at the same time act exclusively in its own interest
by abrogating its international treaties and standing apart from
international cooperation on moral issues.

XVII. And surely, in our country, under our Constitution, it
is a fundamental error to suppose that any crisis or emergency can
justify any form of political oppression. Since September 11, far too
many public voices have presumed to “speak for us” in saying that
Americans will gladly accept a reduction of freedom in exchange for
greater “security”. Some would, maybe. But some others would accept a
reduction in security (and in global trade) far more willingly than they
would accept any abridgement of our Constitutional rights.

XVIII. In a time such as this, when we have been seriously and
most cruelly hurt by those who hate us, and when we must consider
ourselves to be gravely threatened by those same people, it is hard to
speak of the ways of peace and to remember that Christ enjoined us to
love our enemies, but this is no less necessary for being difficult.

XIX. Even now we dare not forget that since the attack of
Pearl Harbor – to which the present attack has been often and not
usefully compared – we humans have suffered an almost uninterrupted
sequence of wars, none of which has brought peace or made us more
peaceable.

XX. The aim and result of war necessarily is not peace but
victory, and any victory won by violence necessarily justifies the
violence that won it and leads to further violence. If we are serious
about innovation, must we not conclude that we need something new to
replace our perpetual “war to end war?”

XXI. What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness,
which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active
state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly
subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways
of peaceableness. We have, for example, several national military
academies, but not one peace academy. We have ignored the teachings and
the examples of Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable
leaders. And here we have an inescapable duty to notice also that war is
profitable, whereas the means of peaceableness, being cheap or free,
make no money.

XXII. The key to peaceableness is continuous practice. It is
wrong to suppose that we can exploit and impoverish the poorer
countries, while arming them and instructing them in the newest means of
war, and then reasonably expect them to be peaceable.

XXIII. We must not again allow public emotion or the public
media to caricature our enemies. If our enemies are now to be some
nations of Islam, then we should undertake to know those enemies. Our
schools should begin to teach the histories, cultures, arts, and
language of the Islamic nations. And our leaders should have the
humility and the wisdom to ask the reasons some of those people have for
hating us.

XXIV. Starting with the economies of food and farming, we
should promote at home, and encourage abroad, the ideal of local
self-sufficiency. We should recognize that this is the surest, the
safest, and the cheapest way for the world to live. We should not
countenance the loss or destruction of any local capacity to produce
necessary goods

XXV. We should reconsider and renew and extend our efforts to
protect the natural foundations of the human economy: soil, water, and
air. We should protect every intact ecosystem and watershed that we have
left, and begin restoration of those that have been damaged.

XXVI. The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never
before that we need to change our present concept of education.
Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to
serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized
research. It’s proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are
economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This
cannot be done by gathering or “accessing” what we now call
“information” – which is to say facts without context and therefore
without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their
lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than
other things; it means putting first things first.

XXVII. The first thing we must begin to teach our children
(and learn ourselves) is that we cannot spend and consume endlessly. We
have got to learn to save and conserve. We do need a “new economy”, but
one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on
excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and
hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a
peaceable economy.

Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry lives and works with his wife, Tanya Berry, on
their farm in Port Royal, Kentucky. An essayist, novelist, and poet, he
is the author of more than thirty books. Berry has received numerous
awards, including the T. S. Eliot Award, the John Hay Award, the
Lyndhurst Prize, and the Aiken-Taylor Award for Poetry from The Sewanee Review. His books include the classic The Unsettling of America, Andy Catlett: Early Travels, and The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry.